Four states take Meta to trial Tuesday in Oakland, seeking damages that could reach $1.4 trillion and force a total restructuring of Facebook and Instagram — the most consequential case yet against a Big Tech empire that spent years addicting American kids while censoring their parents and pushing woke content on the young and vulnerable.

The multi-state coalition accuses Meta of deliberately engineering its platforms to hook children and of harvesting data on kids under 13 without parental consent, a direct violation of federal law. The lawsuit, originally filed by dozens of states three years ago, features California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey as lead plaintiffs. The other 25 states in the coalition will get their trials later.

"Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens. Its motive is profit," the lawsuit states.

The financial ask — $1.4 trillion, nearly Meta's entire market capitalization — is designed to wound. Paying it would bankrupt the company and effectively transfer ownership to the states. Cornell law professor James Grimmelmann told the Associated Press that such an outcome "seems extremely unlikely" and that courts have historically stopped short of maximum penalties in similar cases. But the number itself is the message: state attorneys general are not negotiating. They want a precedent.

"The state attorneys general are going for the gusto," said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. "They are trying to set the definitive precedent in this case."

Meta called the penalty "untethered to any claimed violation" and argued in a July 6 filing that "a sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement."

On the eve of trial, Chief Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers handed the states two procedural victories. She allowed whistleblower Arturo Béjar — a former insider with direct knowledge of Meta's practices — to testify despite Meta's claim that he allowed Signal chats with other insiders to auto-delete in defiance of retention orders. The judge called Meta's motion a "Hail Mary" attempt to eliminate a strong witness. She also allowed the states to present select evidence during opening statements, weeks before most of it would enter the record through testimony.

Meta fought aggressively to keep the suit from reaching a jury and to restrict what evidence could be introduced. Its attorneys cited "Section 230 issues" among their objections — the same legal shield that has protected Big Tech from liability for years while those same companies used it as cover to censor conservative voices and curate content with ideological bias. The protection that insulated Meta from consequences for what it pushes onto screens may finally be cracking.

The trial comes just months after Meta lost two groundbreaking civil suits in state courts, with juries in Santa Fe and Los Angeles finding its products harmful to children. A New Mexico judge just added more than $500 million to the existing $375 million verdict and compelled Meta to overhaul its products for young users. "This is not just a judgment against one company. It is a blueprint," New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a statement reported by the Los Angeles Times.

Meta reported a rare profit decline last month, citing $2.4 billion in legal expenses.

The question now is whether this trial delivers accountability or becomes another spectacle where the company pays a fraction of the damage it caused and returns to business as usual — censoring Americans, mining their children's data, and counting the profits.